


Mysterious Magic

by Deepdarkwaters



Category: The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Genre: Best Friends, F/M, Found Family, Friends to Lovers, Gardens & Gardening, M/M, Multi, Threesome - F/M/M, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-18 22:57:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5946435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/pseuds/Deepdarkwaters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's always mysterious magic working in the garden throughout the winter, but never before like this.<br/>Mary remembers the talk of magic all those years ago when they first discovered the garden – four years, though it seems much longer. It's as though the garden has been theirs forever, and a day here feels a month long, a sort of fantastical fairyland, while the rest of the world outside of its walls whirls past much too quickly, like the landscape seen through a carriage window.</p><p>There's the strangest sensation in her stomach, her heart, of something wonderful growing, ready to bloom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mysterious Magic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sonicshambles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonicshambles/gifts).



> Dear sonicshambles - I tried to do something set later but it just wasn't coming together as well as I'd hoped, so this is my second go at it. Probably not quite as post-canon as you wanted, but everything you mentioned loving about the book is the same stuff I love (specifically "found family, real family that learns to become a true family, nature as a healer, friendships that overcome all sorts of boundaries" <3) so I worked as much of that in as I could. Really hope you enjoy it!
> 
> (Mary is 17 and the boys are 19 by the final section - UK age of consent has been 16 since 1885 so I've not tagged it as underage, but thought it's best to mention for anyone elsewhere who doesn't like to read under 18s.)

The swing is the heart of the garden – long ropes around a sturdy branch, wide wooden seat worn smooth by the weather. They fit on there side by side, the three of them, taking turns to be the one in the middle, clinging tight to one another's hands and arms and clothing as they soar and plummet and soar again. In the summer they close their eyes against the bright sunshine, in spring the rain, autumn the howling Yorkshire wind, and the cold of the winter snow, and simply feel instead: the press of hands, and laughter breathed against cheeks.

"We're too big," Colin says one day, awkwardly prising himself out of the swing and rubbing a rueful hand against the place on his hip where the rope had been chafing. "We ought to make a new seat." But another swing wouldn't be _their swing_ , Mary thinks. They might as well not have one at all.

Then Dickon puts one leg over the seat and tugs Colin's sleeve until he does the same, pressed as close to Dickon as books on a shelf and leaving enough space for Mary to sit side-saddle as usual, and they start to swing again.

"Did you hear Mrs Medlock?" Mary asks the boys one winter morning. She holds her hand cupped over her freezing nose for a moment until it feels as though it starts to thaw in the hot little prison of her breath. "'Why you'd go and run around in the ice and wind when there's a good fire in the grate I shall never understand'."

Nobody answers and she wonders for a strange moment whether they've left while her back was turned, but she looks over her shoulder and they're swinging lazily, huddled together, paying no attention to her at all.

"Tha's cross with me, Miss Mary," Dickon says. He sounds amused, which is rather infuriating, leaning there against the wall with a gentle little smile on his mouth.

"No I'm not," she tells him – crossly, which makes him laugh and her frown. She stamps across the frosty ground to the swing and spreads out her skirt so there's no room for Dickon. "Where's Colin?"

"Afeared of his cousin's sour face, I shouldn't wonder."

She hears his footsteps crunching behind her, feels the gentleness in his rough hands when he gives her a push and she sails, laughing, into the sky.

"It's so cold," Colin grumbles, sounding like the complaining wretch he'd been when Mary first met him.

She says nothing, but catches him by the sleeve and brings his hand to her lips, breathing softly on his chilled fingers to warm them. Dickon watches her, silent, eyes bright and sharp like a robin's, then he takes Colin's other hand and rubs it between his own.

"Go indoors, warm thysel'. The garden will wait for thee."

Suddenly silent, Colin leans his forehead on Mary's shoulder, and she sees him curl his fingers around Dickon's as if to say _no. I'll stay_.

There's always mysterious magic working in the garden throughout the winter, but never before like this.

Mary remembers the talk of magic all those years ago when they first discovered the garden – four years, though it seems much longer. It's as though the garden has been theirs forever, and a day here feels a month long, a sort of fantastical fairyland, while the rest of the world outside of its walls whirls past much too quickly, like the landscape seen through a carriage window.

There's the strangest sensation in her stomach, her heart, of something wonderful growing, ready to bloom.

"Mary." Colin says her name quietly, as though he's not used to its shape in his mouth. "I'm frightened."

"Whatever of?"

There's room to sit side by side when there's only the two of them, clinging to a rope each and slowly kicking the swing into motion with the toes of their boots just touching the frozen ground below.

"Spring coming."

"Why in the world would you be frightened of spring?"

"Of..." He goes silent and reaches for her hand, turning it over in his own and tracing the lines on her palm with his tickling fingertip. "Of things changing."

Things do change, in more ways than one. They make space for vegetables, determined to do what little good they can during the war even though half the Misselthwaite grounds have been taken over by potatoes and cabbages already. Too many days the swing is empty, lurching gently in the breeze on its own as though swung by a ghost while Mary, Colin and Dickon work in the soil, planting and weeding, sometimes talking, sometimes silent.

But every evening they find a moment to crowd onto the swing before they go home – so things don't change so much after all.

Colin kisses her first. She's almost fifteen, he's almost seventeen; sitting there shocked into stillness, Mary has enough time to think wildly how young that seems before he's moving away from her, flushing dark and not meeting her surprised stare. Behind him, leaning against the swing rope, Dickon's eyebrows have flown high, wrinkling his forehead, although he says nothing for a long time until finally he blows his breath out in a noisy whistle and comments, "Tha' could almost hear the grass grow in this silence."

Mary starts laughing first, and Colin leans back against Dickon's chest, grinning, bashful, relieved.

Old Ben Weatherstaff dies in May. It's an unseasonably pretty day for his funeral, endless blue sky above and a wild breeze throwing cherry blossoms down on their heads. Pink petals gather in the gutters of the church and sail softly on the wind like eddies of snow, a blanket of blooms on the freshly turned soil of his grave. Mary thinks how much he'd like that.

"Have you advertised for a new gardener?" Colin asks on their walk home, but Uncle Archibald smiles, glances back over his shoulder at Dickon, and says, "Why should I? I have three already."

It doesn't last. It can't.

Mary feels a creeping dread chilling her skin that she's not felt since India, since the stink and hopeless horror of the cholera that swept over everything she knew and washed it away like a wave.

"You can't go." Her fingers are twisting urgently in Dickon's shirt and Colin's pocket, as though the flimsy fabric might bind them to her if only she could make her trembling grip strong enough. "Not both of you."

"Mary."

She doesn't know who spoke, doesn't care; she only kisses Dickon desperately and then Colin, shaking, terrified, in their arms.

The garden feels too big for one. She's glad when Uncle Archibald finds her there one day, although it's also somewhat strange, something like a betrayal of the boys and all their secrets, old and new, even though it was her uncle's garden first.

He's swinging gently, pushing himself with the tip of his cane pressed into the ground, and Mary's sitting on the grass by his feet. "Isn't it terrible," he says after a long silence, "that I wish he were still sick?"

"He was never sick in the first place," Mary reminds him, but she wishes it too.

When he comes next he watches her work: digging out insistent weeds, pruning wild branches.

"Mistress Mary, quite contrary," he murmurs. She feels a queasy twist in her stomach – the rhyme always reminds her of Dickon, and her uncle's sad, lovely smile is too like Colin's. "This place of death, you've given it back life."

"Then I ought to go to France." Suddenly angry, she throws down her shears in a temper – but Uncle Archibald draws her closer, holds her like her ayah used to even when she scratched and bit until she's sobbing, frustrated and defeated, against his collar.

_The leaves are turning already_ , she writes to Dickon. _The garden is racing ahead of me and I'm here, lagging behind with a pain in my side and no breath left. You'll be ashamed of me when you return. The flowers miss you almost as much as I do._

 _Uncle Archibald said I might call him Father if I want to_ , she writes to Colin. _I should hate to have you as a brother_. She hopes he understands what she leaves unsaid. She thinks he will, but draws a tiny pencil heart below her name to make sure of it.

_Dearest Mary_ , Dickon writes back in his solid, careful print, _bite thy tongue I should never be ashamed of thee, I wish I had a flower to send or 5 hundred with my love_.

 _Well I should hate to have you as a sister!_ Colin writes back. The rest of the page is crammed full of drawings, hearts and roses and a multitude of tiny crosses that make her blush to remember the day before the boys both left: the flutter of frightened kisses they'd pressed all over her face and each other's, and six clasping hands, three thundering hearts.

It doesn't strike Mary until years later how very lucky she is that the boys return when so many others ended up in nameless French graves. She hears Cook down in the kitchens singing joyful hymns as she bakes, she rushes to Uncle Archibald's side when he drops his cane and his legs tremble out from beneath him and he prays on his knees, almost weeping – but herself, it's not God she thanks as she kisses Dickon under the oak tree and shivers at Colin's lips on the back of her neck. It's whatever boundless magic lives in the garden.

They sneak out, hand in hand, and run silently across the lawn in the dark, around the side of the kitchen gardens to the hut where Dickon's lived since Ben died. He looks surprised to see them, yawning and tousled with sleep, until Colin strides forward and backs him against the wall – then Dickon starts laughing, muffled in Colin's mouth, and reaches his hand out for Mary's to pull her in between them.

"I'm a servant," he protests half-heartedly, like always, but Mary tells him, "You're a soldier," and he kisses her with his hands tangled fiercely in her hair.

When Mary wakes, the sky outside the window is the silvery grey of approaching dawn, and Colin and Dickon are whispering either side of her. She wriggles, uncomfortably hot on the narrow bed between the press of their bodies; immediately their hands are on her, Dickon's rough fingertips tenderly tracing her cheekbone, Colin's arm slipping over her waist.

"Come to Colin's bed next time," she tells Dickon, voice thick and clumsy with sleep. "It's bigger."

"Please," Colin whispers. His warm hand leaves Mary's waist, stretching farther over Dickon's.

"But Medlock," Dickon starts, and the hut rings with stifled, horrified laughter.

The garden is where they retreat to, of course, after first spending a few careful days pouring new gravel onto all the paths around the estate so they'll be able to hear the crunching footsteps of anybody approaching. In the shade of the oak tree, surrounded by fallen leaves and the slumbering winter plants, the boys chase the chill away from Mary's bared skin with their hands and the warmth of their kisses, overlapping trails of them laid up the long indent of her spine when they lift her skirts, pressed into the thudding pulses at her neck and wrist.

It's wrong, she knows it's wrong, she knows how badly this could go for all of them if anybody finds out or disaster happens – she knows how babies come to be, after all, it would be impossible to grow up in the country surrounded by wildlife and not know – but she doesn't care: they're alive, they're home, they're real and solid and _here_ and nothing else matters, nothing in the world except the prickling heat of their mouths and fingers on her skin, the fumbling way they kiss each other over her shoulder as if they've never done it before.

"I don't know what I want," Mary mumbles against Colin's crooked collar and the salty glimmer of sweat on his collarbone, "but I know I want it."

"Here?" Dickon asks, a gentle breath against her ear as he's turning her from her side onto her back and dipping his fingers between the suddenly wanton sprawl of her thighs. There's a rising sound that wants to spill out of her at the touch, bitten back with an effort that hurts until Colin kisses her again and she cries it into his mouth instead, letting him swallow it away like a secret.

"Here," she tells Dickon, finding his wet fingertips and directing them lower until he presses one inside and takes a turn with her mouth, finding her tongue with his own as though he's trying to taste the pleading hungry little sound she makes. "Here," she tells Colin, tugging insistently at the cuff of his shirt until he's touching her as well, two fingers circling the place she shows him that makes her breath come out ragged and her heart flutter alarmingly in her chest. She can feel Dickon inside her – the delicious slow slide of one finger, then a second – and the stiffened shape of the front of his trousers pressing against her hip, the same on her other side when Colin stretches out beside her on the blanket and tangles his fingers in her hair, tilting her face away from Dickon's so he can kiss her again.

"Tha' never learned to share yet?" Dickon says, soft and teasing. Colin tries to give him a baleful look but starts laughing instead, slipping his other hand into the mess of hair behind Dickon's head and drawing him down to kiss them both, a tumble of giddy breath and three clumsy mouths. Mary's trembling from the unbearable sweetness of it all, the shivering ripple of goosebumps rushing out like ripples across her skin, the rising, curling heat being drawn forth by the slide of their fingers. She leaves them to each other, her head tipping back helplessly against the scratchy woollen blanket, covering their hands with both of her own to urge them _more_ and _harder_ and _yes_ until her spiralling pleasure crests and then shatters through her in a roiling surge of heat and shudders, making her spill frantic little nonsense sounds into the boys' mouths when they kiss her again.

Dickon's accent gets broader when he's tired or talking too fast, musical and lovely, familiar like the sound of favourite poetry. "Bless thee, pretty lass," he mumbles into her hair, against her ear, trembling almost as much as she is; she can feel the wavering movement of it in his fingers where they're still pressed inside of her, the slick slide of his thumb caressing the place Colin had been touching before, and it's only Dickon's mouth pressing fiercely against her own that stops her from crying out again. "Tha's a rose, Miss Mary, prettiest thing this garden's ever seen."

"I love you," she tells him, a fervent whisper half-lost in his mouth but one she thinks he must have heard clearly enough from the way he goes still when she says it and buries his face into the wild tangles of her hair. He starts feverishly kissing her cheek and forehead and eyelids while Colin's kissing her fingers and the cup of her palm, and her heart thuds harder, full to bursting with the feeling that nothing else she ever finds in the world will be as fine and beautiful as this. "Both of you. Let me show you."

"Not me. I spent in my trousers like an uncontrollable schoolboy." Colin's cheeks are flushed pink but he doesn't sound a bit ashamed when he collapses on his back with one arm flung over his eyes and the other, fingers still wet from touching Mary, adjusting the rumpled mess they've all made of his clothing. Instead he sounds as though he's almost laughing, and when he peeks out from behind his elbow his green eyes are bright and glimmering with merriment, at curious odds with this look of ravenous, teeming desire. "I should very much like to watch you, though."

"Mary?" Dickon says quietly, eyes as blue and fathomless as the sky searching hers as though he needs to check one final time that she's sure, that it's not all some elaborate game or hoax or fantastical dream.

"Stay close," she tells Colin, so he helps her to sit up when she struggles, helps her unfasten Dickon's trousers and push them down around his thighs. He's too thin from army rations, as thin in the legs now as Mary herself when she's used to seeing him broad with muscles from a lifetime of running about Missel Moor, but he's as strong as he ever was, and as gentle, easing Mary back down against the blanket with a smile on his mouth and a look of such unguarded happiness in his eyes that she wants to laugh, suddenly, and has to fight herself to keep the sound inside in case he takes it the wrong way and feels as though she's making fun.

"What is it?" he asks, and Mary's laugher bursts free of her, singing out into the cold winter sky even as the thick, solid press of him sliding inside her makes her want to cry out his name.

"Nothing. I'm glad you're home."

There's a shivering moment when she thinks her body might find that pulsing, perfect heat again, but there's something not quite there in the movements and she stops chasing it, focusing instead on the beautiful play of emotions on Dickon's face, as clear as a story in the picture-house they went to once in Thwaite. His hands are planted hard in the blanket either side of her shoulders, holding himself up to keep from crushing her; when she turns her head to look at Colin she can see the thrum of effort in Dickon's forearms, sweat gleaming on his skin below his turned-up sleeves and chilling as fast as it comes in the cool air.

"Darling," Dickon says in a choked little broken whisper, lost in Mary's hair when he tucks his face against her neck to kiss her there, "my sweet lass, my flower." There's something almost peculiar about the endearments coming from someone who's usually so forthright, but they're all the sweeter for it; there's a twisting inside her stomach, the fluttering ghosts of butterflies, and she fights past the bulk of her skirts to find his bare skin and drag him deeper.

"You mustn't inside her," Colin says suddenly, and Dickon's eyes fly open, dazed for a moment, fighting clearer even as the motion of his hips and backside under Mary's grasping hands starts to stutter and slow.

"I know."

"Will you let me...?"

Dickon catches Colin's hand out of the air when it reaches for his face, drawing two fingers into his mouth and speaking around them, smiling, so his voice comes out slurred. "Aye, if tha'll have me."

Mary misses him when he leaves her: the cold air feels colder, she feels _empty_ without him filling her, but the butterfly feeling comes back into her stomach when he tugs her skirts back down over her legs, smoothing the fabric down so she feels the solid, warm pressure of his palm on her thighs as though they're still bare for him. He kisses her again, softly, a sweet little brush of his lips against hers, and twists around to lie sideways on the blanket, his head resting on her stomach and his fingers entwined with hers, their clasped hands held to his mouth so he can kiss her there even as Colin's settling awkwardly on his front between Dickon's parted legs.

Mary watches them: painfully horrified at first, seeing Colin's mouth opening in a hungry kiss around where Dickon's still shining wet from her, then fascinated, lifting up on her elbows for a better view of his sucking mouth and the pleasure in his half-closed eyes. She's almost jealous for a moment – the thought that they must've done this while they were away, without her, prickles at her heart like a hat-pin stabbed there – but it's fleeting and it passes, chased away by Dickon's grasping hand on hers, the way he keeps murmuring her name and Colin's amid his begging little whimpers, and the way Colin keeps flickering his eyes between them, Dickon's face to Mary's captivated gaze, holding it there and slowly smiling around Dickon as if to remind her that they're in this together. Dickon shudders when he spends, spine arching, his head falling off Mary to land at a funny angle on the blanket until she slides her fingers through his hair and draws him back to rest on her. She strokes his forehead, murmurs nonsense at him until he calms, until Colin clambers over them to rest against Mary's other side, wiping his mouth with his thumb.

Lying in the cold with their breath mingling above their faces in cloudy white plumes, Colin warm on her right and Dickon hot as a furnace and still trembling on her left, Mary remembers the magical day they'd first taken Colin out in his chair to show him the garden, how his eyes had shone with a brightness she knew had never been there before. _I shall get well_ , he'd insisted, flushed in the cheeks and near to weeping with happiness, _and I shall live forever and ever and ever_ , and today, here, it feels as though they really might.


End file.
